PptxDiff — A Diff Tool for Slides

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[!warning] :warning: THIS PROJECT IS BEING DEVELOPED RAPIDLY. FEATURES MAY BREAK OR YOU MAY FIND BUGS AS THIS IS IN EARLY STAGE OF DEVELOPMENT.

What is pptxdiff?

A single-file, client-side tool for comparing two PowerPoint decks (or many pairs at once), rendered with real fidelity and diffed on text, formatting, images, tables, charts, animations, transitions, speaker notes, and more — with a full reviewer workflow (approvals, comments, history) built in.

No build step, and no install required if you'd rather just open index.html directly — or install it as a CLI via npm.

Features

• High-fidelity rendering — real .pptx parsing (OOXML) plus @aiden0z/pptx-renderer for pixel-accurate slide previews, with a schematic fallback if a part can't be rendered.
• Deep diffing — text (word-level highlighting), fonts, color, alignment, position, shape borders, wrap, hyperlinks (text-run and shape-level), images/charts (content + position), tables (cell text, background, borders), backgrounds, animations, transitions, speaker notes (text and formatting), embedded fonts, slide master/layout inheritance, section headers.
• Deck-level comparison — not just 1:1 pairs: content-similarity alignment handles inserted/removed/reordered slides, with ADDED / DELETED / MOVED / CHANGED / IDENTICAL status tags (stackable — a slide can be both MOVED and a DUPLICATE).
• Duplicate detection — same-deck near-duplicate slides, and cross-deck duplicates (a Before slide resembling a different, unaligned After slide), with an adjustable sensitivity threshold, a performance cap for large decks, and a per-pair ignore list.
• Reviewer workflow — multiple reviewers (@handle/email + name), per-slide and per-diff Approve/Reject (with rollups), threaded comments (add/reply/delete, single and bulk), an approval history log, and scoped "clear decisions" (all / just mine / a specific reviewer / a slide range) — all backed by a single shared confirmation-modal component for every destructive action.
• Batch mode — compare many deck pairs at once (order- or filename-matched), with per-pair diff counts and cross-deck duplicate counts.
• Three-way merge — per-diff Keep-Before/Keep-After/Custom picks, a per-slide winner override, a merge-winner preview, and a real (beta) merged .pptx export (text/tables/background/notes/transitions; images/charts are not re-embedded).
• Exports — PDF, standalone HTML report, JSON (with a uiState block for round-trip re-import — merge or overwrite an in-progress session), CSV/JSON decisions, Markdown summary, Notion-flavored Markdown, Confluence wiki markup, and live push attempts to Slack (webhook), Notion (API), and Confluence (API) — the latter two typically blocked by browser CORS outside a backend proxy, and fail gracefully with the file-based export as a fallback.
• Keyboard shortcuts (press ? for the full list) and a touch-friendly batch-file reorder (drag-and-drop with a touch ghost preview).
• Dark mode, localStorage persistence (reviewer state; live-push credentials are opt-in, per-field).
• Self-tests — an in-browser Red/Green regression suite (Run self-tests button) covering the diff engine, alignment, duplicate detection, merge logic, and a static-analysis guard against stale method references.

Getting started

Option A — npx (no install)

npx pptxdiff

Starts a local server and opens the app in your default browser.

Option B — npm (global install)

npm install -g pptxdiff
pptxdiff

Option C — just the file (no npm at all)

git clone https://github.com/sugatoray/pptxdiff.git
cd pptxdiff
open src/pptxdiff/index.html   # or just double-click it / serve the folder statically

The app ships with a built-in sample deck (sample-pptx.js generates it on load) so you can try every feature immediately — no files to upload. Drop in your own .pptx pair, or click Reset to sample.

Note: the app is fully offline-capable — React, ReactDOM, Babel, JSZip, @aiden0z/pptx-renderer, and the Spectral font are all vendored locally under src/pptxdiff/vendor/ and loaded from disk, not from a CDN. No internet connection is required to run it, for any of the options above. Set PPTXDIFF_LITE_MODE=1 (or append ?lite=1 to the URL) to opt back into CDN sourcing instead — see bin/cli.js.

Headless CLI & Web API (in progress, not yet published)

Two additional packages under src/packages/ let another program — a script, a CI job, an AI agent — get a diff result as data instead of a human clicking through the browser app: @pptxdiff/cli (exposing the pptxdiff-cli command with diff/checksum/textconv/difftool/install-git-integration subcommands and diff(1)-style exit codes) and @pptxdiff/server (POST /v1/diff, POST /v1/checksum, GET /v1/health). Both drive the same unmodified index.html headlessly via Playwright, so their answers can't disagree with what you'd see in the browser.

pptxdiff-cli install-git-integration wires *.pptx into git diff/git difftool in one command — git diff/git log -p line-diff a deck's text content instead of showing "Binary files differ," and git difftool --tool=pptxdiff opens the real GUI pre-loaded with both versions and returns to the shell after the browser window is closed.

Not published to npm yet — install from a checkout (see each package's own README under src/packages/). Full docs: Headless CLI & Web API. Design/rationale: docs/.scrolls/CLI_API_DESIGN.md.

Documentation

Project documentation is maintained at:

[!note] Docs

pptxdiff: https://sugatoray.github.io/pptxdiff/

Development

git clone https://github.com/sugatoray/pptxdiff.git
cd pptxdiff
node bin/cli.js    # run the CLI straight from source, no install/build step

To exercise it as if it were installed (e.g. to test the pptxdiff command itself):

npm link
pptxdiff
npm unlink -g pptxdiff   # when done

Project structure

bin/cli.js                    # npm CLI entry point — local static server + opens your browser
package.json                  # npm package manifest (bin, files, no runtime dependencies)
src/pptxdiff/index.html       # the whole application (template + logic, self-contained)
src/pptxdiff/support.js       # DC runtime the app is authored against (pinned; don't casually upgrade)
src/pptxdiff/sample-pptx.js   # builds the in-browser sample/test-fixture .pptx files
src/packages/pptxdiff-cli/    # @pptxdiff/cli headless CLI package — exposes pptxdiff-cli command
src/packages/pptxdiff-server/ # Web API (@pptxdiff/server) — not yet published, see its own README
docs/.scrolls/                # project memory — read docs/.scrolls/STARTER.md first if you're extending this

Contributing / extending this project

[!note] Not Open to Contributions

Currently not accepting contributions. Please feel free to open issues at the GitHub repository.

AI Driven Development: See CLAUDE.md.

License

See LICENSE.